3.5.03

The Old Man of the Mountain, the natural stone profile that appears on everything in New Hampshire from the road signs to the state quarter, fell from its mountainside, leaving nothing recognizable in the cliff face Saturday.

Don Bliss, the state's director of emergency management, said there were no injuries when the stone fell sometime Friday night or Saturday.

It wasn't immediately clear what caused the fall, but Amy Bahr, president of the Franconia Heritage Museum, said she has long been aware that the natural profile could slide.

"I knew it would go sometime, I just didn't think it would happen in my lifetime," she said.

1.5.03

the captivating Edna O'Brien delivers the Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield Foundation Address, at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, May 15th, 2002. text at The New Yorker Online:

Down the years, the written word has incurred crucifixion, beheading, stoning, castration, burnings, outrage, vehemence, intemperance, and a bigotry that veers from the righteous to the superstitious. To take two tiny examples: Theodore Roosevelt described Tolstoy as "a sexual and moral pervert." Subsequently, the Postmaster General prevented copies of "The Kreutzer Sonata" from being distributed, lest it imperil the morals of America. Stalin, the Kremlin mountaineer, who had liquidated millions, believed, in the occasional Faustian moment, that Mandelstam possessed the magical powers of a shaman. My own mother sustained such a revulsion for the written word it was as if she had read Molly Bloom in a secret incarnation and had to do atonement for it.Her constant adage to me, which is certainly open to interpretation, was "That paper never refused ink."

Writers have been in the trenches from time beginning. Euripides, to my mind the greatest of the Greek dramatists, was driven out of Athens around 409 B.C., his crime being his unflinching depiction of the evil inherent in both God and man. Cutting across the orchestrated glorification of power and plunder, he wrote of the monumental folly of the Trojan War, supposedly fought over a bedizened, sensuous, and totally guiltless Helen of Troy. He fled to Macedonia and was devoured by the king's hunting dogs, which is how he died. Danger comes in many guises—political, religious, sexual, psychological, and linguistic. The stymieing of thought and of ideas has always had precedence in every epoch. Followers of Confucius were burnt alive, the emperor Tiberius had those who criticized him starved to death and then crucified. The English crown, with a nicety inconsistent with much else of its conquest and rapine, solved it completely by forbidding printing except by royal license, thus creating an ethos of precensorship, which continued until 1695. Sexual censorship found its flowering, its glorious patronage, in the person of Queen Victoria and her vassals, who commenced the drive for the purification of literature. They might just have foreseen the advent and birth of the Jesuitical James Joyce, born in Dublin on February 2, 1882, a city that he left forever in his early twenties, disavowing Mother Church and Mother Ireland. Joyce, smarting under early rejections, wished that his work would glean the same wrath as Flaubert's "Madame Bovary," in short, to be so scandalous as to incur a public trial. His prayer was duly answered.(more)

But she is sure that the kiss is coming. The man has already closed his eyes and he is already bending his head slightly towards the woman.
He will give her the kiss she is expecting.
So, Erwitt the unhappy husband, the father, the photographer who was prevented from seeing his children growing up manages to let his cool fingertip coax the lens of his camera into bringing out the emotion of a promise kept at the very moment that it was made. It is the absolute guarantee that happiness exists.
And that one can watch it."

29.4.03

The Epic Of Gilgamesh - written by a Middle Eastern scholar 2,500 years before the birth of Christ - commemorated the life of the ruler of the city of Uruk, from which Iraq gets its name. Now, a German-led expedition has discovered what is thought to be the entire city of Uruk - including, where the Euphrates once flowed, the last resting place of its famous King.

{not a word, not one word, about the recent difficulties in that ancient land. as though there were/are two earths, two BBC's, one with war, and one without, and I somehow get both of them on my computer.}